Which non-foreign ‘adversaries’ do elites have in mind when they promote domestic censorship and news blockades?
I want to put three thoughts in front of you, drop three stones in the slipstream of your mind. Perhaps you’ll see the ripples as they cross, note their interaction, hear what their crossing says.
The future this article previews isn’t new, just newly forgot.
Domestic ‘Terror’ from the Activist Left
First, from ace investigator Lee Fang (parts of this piece are subscriber-only):
DHS and FBI Depict Vegan Activists as Potential Domestic Terrorists
Imagine a young woman named Jane who recently adopted a vegan lifestyle after learning about factory farming in college. She discusses animal welfare and begins attending protests.
For most, Jane’s experiences sound remarkably benign.
But for the Department of Homeland Security, the young woman is following a “path of potential radicalization,” according to new documents released through a public records request.
The scenario was one of several depicted in a violence prevention workshop from the DHS Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, a division of the agency that works to counter domestic terrorism.
Jane’s supposed path towards violence — as featured in the DHS workshop — is composed of little more than everyday experiences that many Americans take as they embrace activism.
In the workshop scenario, Jane reacts with anger when discussing animal cruelty and mentions that she joined a group that has “a reputation for holding controversial protests.” She had not only become “an animal lover,” but had become “militant about food and animal rights, and other issues like testing.”
Note the “workshop.” This is a report of a DHS workshop on domestic terrorism, where new threats may come from, and what to do. The source doc is here; you can probably guess the rest of what it says. If not, Fang lays it out.
Here’s the cover portion of the document and summary-first remarks:
Fang’s report includes the FBI component in defining the animal-rights “threat” to internal security:
Can you see where this is headed? If you do, you’re not alone.
The ‘Foreign-Domestic Switcheroo’
The second stone drops here. Does what you read above touch what’s below?
Through a complicated set of leaks (described here), we find “that the Aspen Institute hosted a ‘Hack-and-Dump Working Group’ exercise in the summer of 2020 titled, ‘Burisma Leak,’ which predicted with uncanny accuracy an upcoming derogatory story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s lost laptop.”
Here’s a link to the Aspen Institute document in question. In it we find the following. First, from the Executive Summary (emphasis mine):
Once a promise of free expression and the democratization of information, the Web and its many channels are now polluted with mis- and dis-information, bots, abuse, lies, and conspiracies – sometimes planned by adversarial actors from home and aboard.
Then, from the section about dealing with “Reporting and Promoting Hack-and-Dumps”:
As we countdown to election day, the risk of a major hack and dump of documents aimed at undermining a candidate or party grows more acute. How can news organizations put provenance front and center? What happens when fabricated documents are released alongside genuine (stolen) content? How can social feeds avoid serving as promoters of foreign or other adversarial entities? Aspen Digital is convening Platform Trust and Safety leaders, cybersecurity reporters, journalism ethicists and First Amendment attorneys to develop and adopt new norms guidelines for publication and coverage of hacked documents.
Note that the Aspen Institute is not just a think tank. It’s where the elites’ 2020 discussion over moderation of hacked content was happening.
Now consider what “promoters of foreign or other adversarial entities” means? The only other adversarial entity that isn’t foreign is … domestic. Can you trust, given what’s above, that this designation — “other adversarial entities” — is reserved just for Proud Boy types?
First of all, this notion that there may be fabrications mixed in with real content is a suggestion that pops up somewhere in nearly every one of these leak stories, even if all the material proves to be real (old friend Malcolm Nance did the job in 2016 in suggesting the Podesta leaks were “riddled with forgeries”). More importantly however, that last line is a great example of what former cybersecurity official and Foundation for Freedom Online head Mike Benz calls the “foreign-domestic switcheroo.”
It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets. You can see the subtlety: the original Stanford piece tries to stick to railing against “disinformation” and information from “foreign adversaries,” but the later paper circulated by Aspen slips in, ever so slightly, a new category of dubious source: “foreign or other adversarial entities.”
These rhetorical devices are essential. It would be preposterous to form (as Stanford did) an “Information Warfare Working Group” if readers knew the “war” being contemplated was against domestic voices. … Butif you start by focusing on Russians and only later mention as an afterthought “other adversarial entities,” you can frame things however you want, from espionage to warfare. As reader O’Neill correctly pointed out, “they are now getting close to being explicit about the fact that their motivation for suppressing news is to fight domestic political adversaries.”
You don’t have to be a lover of these sources to hate what’s you’ve just found out. And I think it’s reasonable to fear, even if you fear Trump more than God herself, what our security agencies do with domestic power.
Regime Change
The last stone dropped in the pond is the oldest one. Before most of you were born, the halls of power fully understood that our security agencies, birthed in the Soviet threat, were fully capable — even tasked with the job — of making sure the global world was a safe American playground.
The list of American-led coups in other countries is long as your leg and both arms. Start here to see most of it. Do these agencies act domestically as they do abroad? The FBI sure does. But what about the CIA and the rest of the alphabet community?
Here’s what Robert Kennedy, the man who was murdered on his way to the 1968 nomination, thought of the murder that felled his brother Jack in 1963 (via The Hill, emphasis mine):
[Robert] Kennedy Jr. said the first call his father, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, made after learning his uncle had been shot was to a CIA desk officer.
“My father said to him, ‘Did your people do this?’” Kennedy Jr. told Fox News’s “Hannity” on Monday.
“His next call was to [Enrique Ruiz-Williams], who was one of the Cuban Bay of Pigs leaders who had remained very, very close to our family and to my father,” he continued. “My father asked him the same question.”
Kennedy Jr. said his father then called John McCone, the head of the CIA, and asked him to come to the family’s house.
“When I came home [from] Sidwell Friends School, my father was walking in the yard with John McCone, and my father was posing the same question to him, ‘Was it our people who did this to my brother?’” he said. “It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother.”
The Hill later tags this story as a “conspiracy theory,” no doubt to distance itself from both charge and source. But the underlying report is nonetheless true, or RFK Jr. is lying.
Ripples In the Pond
What do these data points sum to? I’ll leave it to you. If you love the FBI as some today do, would you love them still if they thought their remit included squelching you and your kind, not just Trump and his, using control of media as their tool?
As I’ve said before, it’s appropriate to fear what a Trump, or worse, a DeSantis — who unlike Trump, who loves adoration and cash, truly loves power — would do if power were given them.
Is it therefore not also appropriate to fear these agencies?
After all, their goals won’t always align with what’s broadly called “the left.” Their goals have never aligned with ours in the past. And unlike Republicans, who are only halfway to their goal, these agencies have power now, and practice using it.
G7 Day 1: Leaders Lecture Russia, China On Nuclear De-escalation While Standing In City Nuked By US
Russia and the Ukraine war are of course high on the agenda for G7 leaders meeting in Hiroshima, Japan starting Friday. Given the venue, the summit kicked off Friday morning with the heads of state laying wreaths at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in commemoration of tens of thousands killed when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city on August 6, 1945.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida welcomed the leaders from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and United Kingdom for the meeting which is being held May 19 -21. EU officials are also present. Speaking from a city which was literally nuked, the G7 leaders called for a“world without nuclear weapons”… but this was aimed only a certain nations, given the statement singles out Russia, Iran, China and North Korea to embrace non-proliferation. The irony was lost on the Western officials, apparently.
The G7 leaders blasted Moscow’s plans to send nuclear weapons to Belarus as “dangerous and unacceptable” and urged for the reimplementation of conformity to the terms of the New START treaty. And on China, the G7 statement said: “China’s accelerating build-up of its nuclear arsenal without transparency nor meaningful dialogue poses a concern to global and regional stability.”
The leaders further said that support of Ukraine is crucial to global stability and peace, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz saying “We have once again assured that we will give Ukraine the necessary support for as long as that is required” – in a press briefing on the first day.
Concerning Russia, the US took the opportunity to unveil expanded sanctions:
The Biden administration has added 71 companies to a trade blacklist for supporting Russia.
The US Department of Commerce’s action targets support for Russia’s military and expands the scope of export controls on Russia and Belarus. The blacklist includes 69 Russian entities, one from Armenia and one from Kyrgyzstan.
The new export controls target oil and gas projects in Russia and Belarus, Commerce said. Other companies include aircraft repair and parts production plants, gunpowder, tractor and car factories, shipyards and engineering centres in Russia.
And this amid reports commenting on the ‘success’ on the Russian oil price cap…
“Following the implementation of the price cap policy, Russia’s oil revenues have fallen substantially compared to both pre-war levels and the elevated level at the onset of the war,” the Treasury said in a fresh report. “Despite selling a consistent volume of oil, Russia makes far less revenue on each barrel because its oil now trades at a significant discount relative to Brent crude, the global benchmark oil price,” the report emphasized.
President Biden on the first day had this key announcement to G7 allies concerning what’s highest on Kiev’s “weapons shopping list”:
President Joe Biden informed G7 leaders on Friday that the US will support a joint effort with allies and partners to train Ukrainian pilots on fourth generation aircraft, including F-16s, a senior administration official tells CNN.
The training is not expected to happen in the US, the official said, and will likely happen entirely in Europe. But US personnel will participate in the training alongside allies and partners in Europe, the official said. It is expected to take several months to complete.
“As the training takes place over the coming months, our coalition of countries participating in this effort will decide when to actually provide jets, how many we will provide, and who will provide them,” the official said.
There’s been talk among Western allies of forming a ‘fighter jet coalition’ – which Zelensky has been pushing for. The Ukrainian leader is expected to travel to Japan in order to address G7 leaders in person. On Friday he addressed the Arab League summit meeting in Saudi Arabia, and further met face-to-face with crown prince MbS.
Protests in the city which the United States nuked in WWII…
Protests in Hiroshima against US🇺🇸 President Joe Biden’s visit for the G7 Summit. Biden refuses to apologise for the US using a nuclear bomb on the city in 1945, which killed 140,000 people. After the bombing, the US covered up the effects of radiation on the population by… pic.twitter.com/usauojFtEZ
— Going Underground (@GUnderground_TV) May 19, 2023
Most estimates put the number of Japanese civilians killed by the Hiroshima nuclear bomb dropped from an American plane at 70,000 or more killed. According to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
Such numbers were large, and appear to have had a sobering effect on President Harry S. Truman. After the August 9 Nagasaki raid (which he had no apparent foreknowledge of), he would put a stop to further bombing, telling his cabinet that “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible,” according to an August 10, 1945, diary entry by then-Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace. It is not clear that Truman had any real sense of how many casualties there would have been prior to the attacks. The only pre-Hiroshima estimate on record is the recollection from Arthur Compton that at a May 31, 1945, meeting of the Interim Committee, J. Robert Oppenheimer had suggested that an atomic bomb dropped would kill “some 20,000 people” if exploded over a city. This is not recorded in the meeting minutes, nor in any other report or correspondence, so it does not seem that this estimate had any special weight to the participants. (Compton amended that this estimate had assumed people would seek shelter; given that no warning was issued for the attacks, this did not occur.)
Oppenheimer would comment obliquely on this variance in before-and-after estimates during the hearing on his security clearance in 1954:
Meanwhile, Rabobank comments as follows on what can be expected concerning ‘punishing’ Russia at the G7, also as the escalatory idea of an outright export ban is still floating around…
“There appears to be a strong commitment by the G7 to support Ukraine and tighten the economic noose on Russia. Sanctions will be broadened to a wider group of goods, especially those that could facilitate Russia’s war effort. According to Bloomberg, the latest draft of a statement does not talk about a near outright ban on exports to Russia, though.”
“Meanwhile, existing sanctions will be tightened by removing loopholes to circumvent them. This would include the strengthening of enforcement in regards to third countries through which Russia is importing banned goods. One key risk here is that the G7 (plus ‘coalition of the willing’) drive a wider gap between them and those countries that have taken on a more ‘neutral’ stance in the matter.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) are threatening to subpoena the CIA to force it to address claims of its involvement in an intelligence community letter to discredit reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Last week, the two Republican-controlled House committees published a report alleging the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) reviewed and approved an October 2020 letter by 51 former U.S. intelligence community officials, which alleged reports about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The Republican report also alleged a PCRB employee may have recruited signatories for the letter discrediting the negative reporting about Hunter Biden and his father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The laptop materials, which were first reported by the New York Post, indicated Joe Biden knew about his son’s foreign business dealings despite having denied such knowledge throughout the 2020 election cycle.
Jordan and Turner sent a letter (pdf) to CIA Director William Burns on Wednesday, requesting that the agency turn over additional documents relating to its involvement in the October 2020 intelligence community letter. The Republican chairmen threatened to use their subpoena power to compel the intelligence agency to divulge its records.
PCRB’s Role in Intel Community Letter
According to the May 10 Republican report (pdf), former CIA officials played an active role in recruiting signatories for the letter discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop reports.
The report alleges U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was working for the Biden campaign at the time, reached out to former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell on Oct. 17, 2020, to discuss the intelligence community letter. Morell, an Obama-era CIA official, was quick to agree to the plan and actively recruited other signatories.
On Oct. 19, 2020, two days after discussing the letter with Blinken, Morell sent a final draft of the letter to the PCRB for review. Morell told the CIA board “[t]his is a rush job, as it need to get out as soon as possible.” According to the Republican report, the signatories hoped to give then-candidate Joe Biden a “talking point” to defend against the Hunter Biden laptop reporting during his final presidential debate with Donald Trump on Oct. 22, 2020.
The PCRB’s sole function is to make sure current and former CIA employees aren’t disclosing classified information in any materials they may release publicly. The board, therefore, has an influential role over current and former agency employees who may be pursuing potentially lucrative book deals about their time working for America’s premier spy agency.
One such signatory, former CIA analyst David Cariens, told congressional investigators that his book was up for consideration by the PCRB at the time Morell and other former intelligence community officials were looking for people to sign their letter. Cariens told investigators that a CIA employee affiliated with the PCRB informed him of the intelligence community letter and asked if he would sign it. Cariens said “the person in charge of reviewing the book” called to tell him that it had been approved without any changes required and then told him about the letter.
However, Treasury Secretary Yellen spoiled the party somewhat today by warning (reportedly) that the market should expect ‘more bank mergers’ (i.e. failures)…
And so, according to the latest H8 report from The Fed, on a seasonally-adjusted basis, total US Commercial Bank deposits fell by $26.4 billion during the week ended 5/10 – the third straight week…
Source: Bloomberg
On a seasonally adjusted basis, US commercial bank deposits (ex-large time deposits) decreased $20.8bn last week (during the week-ending 5/10), for the fifth straight weekly outflow. That is the lowest since March 2021…
Source: Bloomberg
On a non-seasonally-adjusted basis, US commercial bank deposits (ex-large time deposits) dropped $50.26 billion (after jumping $63.8 billion) the prior week.
And judging by yesterday’s money market inflows, the deposit outflows continued this week (remember, deposit data is lagged a week to money market and Fed balance sheet data), despite reassurances from WAL…
Source: Bloomberg
On a seasonally-adjusted basis, Large, Small, and Foreign banks all saw outflows last week. Small bank deposits are at their lowest since May 2021…
Source: Bloomberg
This is the 5th straight week of Small Bank outflows and Small Banks saw the largest outflows…
Large Banks -$7.49 billion SA (-$36.5 billion NSA)
Small Banks -$8.742 billion SA (-$12.5 billion NSA)
Foreign Banks -$4.627 billion SA (-$1.2 billion NSA)
Source: Bloomberg
Finally, after adjusting for all the revisions (which are now an every week occurrence), what sticks out to us is that the last 5 weeks have seen $379 billion in NSA bank outflows, while SA the number is an outflow of only $171 billion.
Source: Bloomberg
So the Fed is claiming there are still over $200 billion in tax-payment related deposits expected to return to banks.
The Fed’s report showed residential real estate loans declined a seasonally adjusted $2.6 billion, while lending for commercial properties rose slightly. Consumer loans also ticked up from the prior week, while commercial and industrial loans fell $3.5 billion.
On the other side of the ledger, Commercial bank lending was little changed in the week ended May 10th, according to seasonally adjusted data. Large bank loans dropped $6.159 billion while Small Bank loans actually rose by $6.85 billion (despite significant deposit outflows)…
Source: Bloomberg
And all of this happened a week before WAL claimed its deposits are rising.
So, Elon Musk sure shook things up the other day with his interview on CNBC where he dared to break the Fourth Wall of media when he took a shot at George Soros comparing him to Magneto from Marvel’s X-Men.
It’s a brutally funny exchange as Musk carefully measures his response, takes his time and then goes into full pop culture legend mode invoking Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride.
Elon Musk is asked about his Tweet saying George Soros reminds him of Magneto 🤣 pic.twitter.com/4gfsURVGIF
That CNBC flak wasn’t confused by this, he’s doing his job. He’s enforcing narrative control.
The choice of Magneto is an astute one, since it implies Soros’ childhood activities during World War II.
And while I appreciate Musk stepping on that third rail of media conformity, George Soros the philanthropist, I still maintain he’s closer to Sheev Palpatine than Erik Lehnsherr.
But what Musk really did was to question why media companies should always bow to the whims of their advertisers.
Musk has been subjected to advertiser boycotts since the day he walked in with the sink. Twitter’s business model needs to change. Advertising isn’t it. It’s only a part of it. Musk understands it needs to evolve because Twitter isn’t like legacy media companies.
Not one bit.
WEF Bloodletting
Musk did this after taking real flak from the internet for hiring World Economic Forum member and top-tier advertising executive Linda Vaccarino as the new CEO for Twitter.
Now, Vaccarino is a troubling hire but with Musk positioning himself as Mr. Free Speech in the common square, it may not be as bad as, “See Mother WEFfer, expect evil to follow,” as the initial Twitter outrage mob suggested.
I’ve told you for more than a year (November 2021, to be precise) that we are past Peak Davos, meaning Peak WEF. The WEF is now an easy bogeyman to tar someone with the broadest of guilt-by-association brushes.
The reality, however, is that viewed dispassionately, this year’s World Economic Forum was a mess, a bunch of globalist ghouls and their retinue of sycophants whistling past their own graveyards wondering where the next big score was coming from.
Top Ghoul Wrangler Soros himself didn’t even show up, preferring instead to suck the blood of the attendees of this year’s Munich Security Conference to ensure the trains to World War III would run on time.
Clubs like the WEF are only as strong as the talent they can keep. Is Vaccarino evidence of brain drain from the WEF? It’s not ludicrous. In fact, it’s more likely than she’s some wide-eyed ideologue.
I’m not saying it’s true, I’m saying it’s possible. So, distrust, but verify is your guide here.
The incentives line up nicely.
Musk needs to shore up Twitter’s relationships with advertisers to keep Twitter afloat.
Vaccarino brings instant credibility to the company.
If Musk is thinking in terms of a different kind of ad model, Vaccarino’s hire makes sense.
Talk to the Hand
The corporate orthodoxy imposed on media companies comes not just from retards like Reed Hastings at Netflix but also through the corruption of their boards by Davos generals like Blackrock and Vanguard.
Their real profit comes from exercising power. Sacrificing a quarter or two of profitability to put the vein tap in deep across the C-Suites of the S&P 500 and EuroStoxx 50 is hard to quantify on the balance sheet.
But Musk can say what he wants in public because that itself is a form of advertising for Twitter and/or Tesla that can’t be yanked by some ninny like Larry Fink or Alex Soros making a phone call.
He’s on their level and the company is private.
When your business model depends on advertising you’re their bitch. Musk knows this so you make the calculated move to attack Soros, becoming a hero to a vast audience spurned by Twitter when Soros, Fink and the rest of the WEF ran the place
One of the first blogs I wrote here in 2016 was called “The Authenticity Gap.”In handicapping that election correctly, that Trump would win, I made the point that despite his obvious deficits, he was far more authentic than Hillary.
Being comfortable being yourself is what drove Trump’s victory. The country was desperate for it and the swing voters were Millennials.
Well, guess what? Musk is shoring up his AQ – Authenticity Quotient – with not only his Millennial fanbois who buy Teslas, but even jaded Gen-X curmudgeons like me, even if I still spend most of my day in Distrust, But Verify mode.
Pied Piper or not, he has the platform to drive the conversation where it was never allowed to go before. We can take it from here, folks.
No, I Said, “Tucker!”
And this brings me to Tucker Carlson, who announced to great fanfare that he’s bringing his erstwhile news show to Twitter, self-produced.
His two short videos since Fox canceled his show, putting him in contract limbo, have generated ratings that even his record cable ratings couldn’t match.
Advertiser boycotts hit Fox multiple times over things Carlson said on air. They don’t want the media to speak the truth, they want it, as Carlson pointed out in his last video, to tell you only the part of the truth that supports their agenda.
Musk has been subject to this since the day he walked into Twitter with a kitchen sink in his hand.
Every globalist tit-sucker and wannabe-brownshirt, but I repeat myself, threatened Musk with extinction. The EU threatened to ban Twitter. The Biden administration began official investigations.
It was all so breathlessly repeated in the compliant media one would have thought going long smelling salts would have been good investment advice for every case of the fucking vapors these people had.
Think back to the so-called “Discord Leaks” and the ruinous press conference with Dept. of Defense Spokesman John Kirby. We had ‘reporters’ openly asking how they could help the DoD suppress information about the war in Ukraine.
As I argued in my blog about this issue, the media was openly simping for the regime, torching what remained of its credibility to announce to the world they have joined that team against us.
Neither the content of these leaks nor the media’s response was revelatory to anyone with a passing acquaintance with the current state of politics. No, the noteworthy thing was that they were so willing to take off the mask so we could all stop pretending they were journalists.
When the media openly asks how they can help … we have crossed into new territory. Why?
Because it’s never been that way before. Yes, we knew the media were court stenographers, people like myself and Kit {Knightly at Off Guardian} have known this for more than a decade. But to openly torch what’s left of their credibility to support disinformation to keep the administration’s secrets is something very very new.
This wasn’t some double-secret 12-D chess maneuver by hyper-competent game players. This was far more what it looked like on the surface, a sphincter-clenching moment of raw panic from people whose lies were outed in pure damage control mode.
So, about that power of the advertisers, again? How do they have any when their platforms and networks have zero credibility?
Who does the CNBC flak dumbstruck by Musk’s Inigo Montoya impression thinks is really in charge here?
And Then the Lights Came On…
It was like that moment in the Pixar classic, UP, where Doug becomes Alpha:
The media is so used to bullying people into submission they don’t know what to do when it doesn’t work. But, why would you do that? Lose Money? It’s unthinkable.
Take a step back and see the reversal here. Do you really think Musk is scared of these quislings when I own the single biggest, and by far, most powerful communications platform in history?
The answer would be no.
And that reason is simple. Musk’s real heresy wasn’t returning something closer to free speech to Twitter. It was proving that the company could operate on 20% of its old budget and one-quarter of its staff.
That 80% cost reduction didn’t just equate to stabilizing the company, it freed it from the tyranny of the advertiser.
Musk doesn’t need advertising on Twitter the way Twitter needed advertising before him. The company wasn’t being run as a profit center measured in dollars.
Twitter was a loss leader for tyrants. The legacy media conglomerates are their policy makers and the ad executives their thought policemen.
Carlson can now self-produce a loss-leader for free speech while his lawyers roast Fox’s chesnuts and he, Musk and Trump can:
… build another Mar-a-Lago in their heads living TV-ad free for months with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” the only choice on the in-house cable feed.
Musk is now turning the entire cost structure of news media on its head. It was always going to happen, he just ripped the last band-aid off exposing the rot underneath.
The media companies and their advertising control model worked so well for so long because it costs billions to run a broadcast network. The on-air talent, the producers, the studio, cameras, travel, etc. are expensive folks. FOX’s makeup budget alone is more than my annual operating costs.
No wonder they just fired Laura Ingraham, too.
Have you seen the 25-54 demo ratings?
The media companies had to depend on the kindness of strangers to even stay in business.
Today most of the distribution has been decentralized, i.e. Twitter and personal ISP fees. Physical production tools are cheap. Bandwidth is cheaper. The overhead of running a small broadcast company with a private subscription model is a far lower percentage of top-line revenue than any big network.
The legacy media can neither buy your loyalty nor coerce your conformity.
Now shit-posters cum ‘investigative journalists‘ like Brian Krassenstein whose tone deaf defense of Soros is what prompted all of this have to work that much harder to protect him.
And thanks to Twitter and things like it, the world is your research department. Now, the best voices, the best talent, spend their time curating what they see. More time for enjoying life, less time wasted sucking up to Sith Lords.
That was Tucker Carlson’s real power when he was at Fox. He’s now free of all of those constraints.
If you want to see where Carlson is headed once he’s doing a free show on Twitter, just look to Megyn Kelly.
— The Megyn Kelly Show (@MegynKellyShow) May 17, 2023
That’s where the editorial bias is now, not in the corporate boardrooms.
You are the ultimate arbiter of what you deem valid. Your eyeballs are all that matters. Your consent.
These are only some of the reasons why Musk owns the most powerful media company in the world.
Does he need to pay Tucker Carlson $20+ million to be on his network? No. Carlson pays Musk.
Does Musk need to hire Carlson a production team? No.
A research team? No.
A legal team to fact check everything? No.
The reason why Musk can’t be bought is because Musk doesn’t need the advertisers.
The advertisers need Musk.
Musk knows it. Carlson knows it. The paid influencers know it. Soros knows it.
What Twitter now does, if its algorithm is set to neutrality, is assist everyone in finding whatever audience they want to attract. The media companies can’t maintain the purity of the signal or enforce the groupthink, because they don’t own the means of production anymore.
All they can do is flood the zone with low quality bots.
And the thing that scares them more than anything else is the day when Musk rolls out the real revenue maker for Twitter. The one where they can’t bribe us with money or power because neither of those things buys dignity.
Join my Patreon if you want your father back, you sonofabitch!
Bumper Week For Banks & Big-Tech But Bonds Suffer Biggest Bloodbath In A Year
“The things we were most worried about didn’t get worse..” was the phrase overheard on one business media channel to sum up why the markets rallied this week…
A week of debt-ceiling optimism-fueled short-squeezing ran into a wall of OpEx flows, Powell’s (hawkish) comments, Yellen’s banking crisis still ongoing reports, and finally reports that debt ceiling talks are going nowhere.
Fed Chair Powell painted a hawkish picture of inflation-fighting warrior during this morning’s panel discussion, highlighting that “failure to get inflation down would prolong pain,” and that “inflation is still far above our 2% objective.” Powell signaled a pause, stating that “we can afford to look at data”, but he noted that the “market rate-path reflects a different forecast than The Fed.”
Powell further extended the “coordinated” Fed messaging from FOMC speakers seen over the the past week – which Nomura’s Charlie McElligott points out has clearly been the FOMC looking to alter the market’s assumed probabililty distribution of the Fed path continuum which is creating the false optic of ‘immiment Fed cuts’ within implied pricing…
Source: Bloomberg
However, comments (below) from Yellen (banking crisis) and Washington (debt ceiling – no deal), sent June rate-hike odds plunging…
Source: Bloomberg
Comments from Treasury Secretary Yellen were interesting given the big gains in regional banks this week as CNN reported her telling the big bank CEOs that “more mergers may be necessary”…
Which roughly translated means: more bank failures are imminent – which is ironic given that regional bank stocks soared almost 10% this week – the best week since Nov 2020 – but Yellen’s comments spooked them today…
Then Washington peed in the punchbowl as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s top debt-ceiling negotiators reportedly “abruptly left a closed-door meeting with White House representatives soon after it began Friday morning, throwing the status of talks to avoid a US default into doubt.” Thus crushing optimism over the debt-ceiling talks.
Source: Bloomberg
Bear in mind that the ‘longer-term’ sovereign risk of the USA remains at extreme highs…
Source: Bloomberg
However, on the week, MegaCap-Tech continued to attract momo/safe-have/FOMO/AI flows with Nasdaq soaring (The Dow was the laggard but still green on the week)…
Shorts were squeezed on the week, but today’s OpEx chaos may spoiled the ability to ignite it again…
Source: Bloomberg
While a handful of MegaCap Tech names led the markets higher, retail stocks were clubbed like a baby seal after TGT, WMT, and FL (FootLocker) also signaled the consumer may be weakening significantly this week…
Source: Bloomberg
Just remember, we’ve seen this pattern of debt-ceiling optimism turn into pessimism before (in 2011)…
Source: Bloomberg
And Nasdaq is extremely overbought…
Source: Bloomberg
Yields exploded higher this week with the short-end massively underperforming. Note that the selling pressure was almost solely during the US day session…
Source: Bloomberg
That is the biggest weekly rise in 2Y yields since June 2022.
Source: Bloomberg
And a massive curve flattening (inverting further)…
Source: Bloomberg
The dollar rallied for the second week in a row but hit notable resistance and faded today…
Source: Bloomberg
Bitcoin chopped around $27,000 (+/- $500) all week…
Source: Bloomberg
Gold’s worst week since Feb, but did bounce back today…
Copper was flat on the week but crude managed gains (despite weakness on the day)_
NatGas soared 15% this week, back at 2-month highs…
Finally, we give the last words of the market week to Nomura’s Charlie McElligott who has good news and bad news for what happens next: the recent PTJ talking point on this current environment looking like the 2006 / 07 playbook increasingly “feels” like the right one: the Equities market can continue to absolutely party until the end-game arrives… and it can take much longer than you think despite “things breaking along the way,” just ripping-out hearts in the meantime as we continue to fend off worry-after-worry, where pervasive skepticism and cynicism towards market conditions keep sentiment- and positioning- “light” and in-turn, continue to feed into a “buyers are higher” pain-trade melt-up within Risk-Assets in the meantime.
Options skews suggest a lot of ‘over-hedging’ remains…
However, McElligott warns, we’ve seen this pattern of behavior before: Similar to my January comments on the “most mis-priced risk” in markets being a false assumption on market sequencing which them assumed “pause then cut,” instead of the risk of the Fed needing to actually take Terminal projections higher, which is exactly what then happened throughout the month of February and roiled markets on account of the January “animal spirits” data phenomenon after the Fed’s premature easing of FCI… it feels like the market is “starting” to get the joke again that there is “growing delta” for yet-another false assumption, resizing the probability distribution of the the bi-modal humps (mega-crash rate-cut AND/OR high-for-longer).
The June-Dec Fed-Funds spread is steepening to reflect this apparent shift…
Source: Bloomberg
The market could get stopped-OUT of the current “pause then cut” assumption and / or get stopped-INTO a disaster “pause then hike” flip…
Source: Bloomberg
…and remember, a seemingly / outwardly “bullish” debt-ceiling deal getting done actually perversely instead releases a new wave of tightening, particularly due to a massive TGA rebuild thereafter with ENORMOUS T-Bill issuance in the months thereafter, creating a monster liquidity drain.
So, be careful what you wish for and maintain light positioning (the latter harder than it sounds amid the AI-phoria).
The turn of the last century brought an age of revolutions, industrial warfare and nearly instantaneous communications across long distances. With these developments came an emphasis on another method of war: information war. This was the type of fight waged with what World War II Deputy Director of the Office of Censorship, Theodore F. Koop, called “Silent Weapons,” in a wartime memoir he published in 1946. Wrote Koop:
The censors’ shears were bayonets that not only formed a rear-guard national defense but also struck hard at the enemy in all three phases of warfare—military, economic, and psychological.
Koop would go on to run CBS News in Washington, DC. Well-known as a powerful media figure, he was also a trusted one, the man who hired Walter Cronkite.
Less well-known was that in 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked him to run a secret national censorship program intended for use in Cold War emergencies. He accepted the offer while still a network news executive, serving in that contingency role under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
The methods of censorship had changed over time, matching changes in the communication technology. During World War I, the United States Government used the Postal Service, the Comstock laws and the reliance on publications reaching subscribers by mail as a wedge. When radio and television broadcasts became pre-eminent, the newly formed Federal Communications Commission began using its authority as stewards of the public airwaves to watch over content. Under the FCC Act of 1934, ostensibly private corporations like CBS, ABC and NBC were allowed to use the public airwaves only under license, acquiring revenue and learning the power of shaping the discourse from the nascent field of advertising.
Though it all, one thing has been remarkably consistent. Government targeted for special attention journalists who reported accurately on the ugly truth of American foreign policy, such as John W. Powell. Powell was an American journalist based in Shanghai who wrote a series of articles for the China Monthly Review(later, the Weekly Review), which said the Chinese government claimed the United States was using biological weapons in the Korean War. He was put on trial for sedition in 1959. The case dragged on in federal court in San Francisco for five years before the charges were dropped. It was enough to make him leave journalism forever.
The impulse to use censorship, and call all information that doesn’t square with the official narrative “disinformation,” is a bipartisan impulse, at least historically. Both Republican and Democratic administrations during the Global War on Terror sought to expand and refine the power of what we now call the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The latter was built, piece by piece, over a century of legislation, executive action, and regulation. A little less than a century after the passage of the Espionage Act, Barack Obama’s administration used it aggressively to target leakers. By that time, computers, the internet, and social media were all new platforms for communication and ripe targets for information suppression.
In an era where cultural memory is short and resources for learning about the inconvenient past are becoming more scarce, it’s useful to look at this century-plus progression in chronological order.
June 15, 1917: As the United States enters World War I, the Espionage Act of 1917 is enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, the first academic to become President, prohibiting “obtaining information, recording pictures, or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
The Act also made obstructing enlistment in the armed forces or causing insubordination or disloyalty in military or naval forces an illegal act. Wilson’s administration also decided that any publications violating the act were “non-mailable matter,” and this rationale was used to suppress dissenting views by aggressively enforcing the postal codes so no subversive publications could reach their subscribers. At least 74 newspapers were denied mailing permits at this time.
May 16, 1918: The Sedition Act of 1918 extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover more offenses, making it a crime to:
incite disloyalty within the military;
use in speech or written form any language that was disloyal to the government, the Constitution, the military, or the flag;
advocate strikes on labor production; promote principles that were in violation of the act; or
support countries at war with the United States.
As the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University notes, “The targets of prosecution under the Sedition Act were typically individuals who opposed the war effort, including pacifists, anarchists, and socialists.”
According the FBI’s own historical timeline, “President Roosevelt called Director Hoover to a morning meeting to discuss his concerns about subversive activity in the United States. He asked Hoover to report on the activities of Nazi and communist groups. The FBI made these investigations at the request of the Secretary of State for the President.”
In 1939, according to the same document, Roosevelt formally assigned responsibility for investigating “espionage, sabotage, and other subversive activities” to a series of agencies and departments, including the “FBI, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department (MID), and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).”
May 26, 1938: The House Un-American Activities Committee is formed.
Created as part of a special investigative committee, and reorganized from previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, HUAC had license to “investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of America’s private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having Communist ties.”
Because of its investigations of prominent intellectuals, entertainers, and politicians, HUAC is one of the few bodies on this list that has become a fixture in American pop culture, featured in movies like The Front and Trumbo.
June 9, 1938: The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) is enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt.
June 29, 1940: The Alien Registration Act, a.k.a. the Smith Act, is enacted, setting criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by violence or force, requiring all non-citizen adult residents to register with the government. Hundreds of communists in America would later be tried under this act.
1940-43?: FBI begins to liaise with an NSA predecessor agency, the U.S. Signals Intelligence Service, which in 1943 was re-named the Signal Security Agency, later became the Army Security Agency, and eventually was absorbed into the NSA.
Again according to the FBI’s own internal timeline, the Bureau sometime before 1947, when the NSA would be formed, began a working relationship with the Signals Intelligence Service. This association would bear fruit in the late forties:
Began a close liaison with the U.S. Army Signals Intelligence Service, the National Security Agency’s predecessor, on the exploitation of Soviet messages that were being decrypted and decoded by military intelligence personnel. The FBI and the NSA were able to identify several hundred persons connected with Soviet intelligence work against the US and its allies. The project continued until 1980 when it was shut down. Among the prominent cases to come from these messages was the Judith Coplon case, the Klaus Fuchs case, and the Rosenberg case.
July/August 1940: Captain John V. Grombach publishes “The Invisible Weapon” in the United States Army’s Infantry Journal on the covert applications of radio technology in warfare and espionage.
Previewing ideas that would become popular in the future, Grobach wrote of mass communication as a weapon:
Propaganda and the protection of military secrets are vital both to participants and to nations near the brink of involvement. Thus a mighty power in the struggle for world dominion by nations, forms of government, and ideals is radio.
International radio is just now beginning to be evaluated adequately as the powerful though invisible weapon it is. Just as dominance in the air by plane may be the key to victory on land and sea, so the use of the ether waves may be the most potent means for mastery of the minds and hearts of men, without which no nation or ideal can survive.
February 16, 1942: U.S. Army intelligence creates a secret spying outfit called “The Pond,” to compete with and spy on the newly commissioned Office of Strategic Services. The aforementioned Grombach is selected to direct the new organization, which operates primarily through commercial cover enterprises like insurance agencies.
April 14, 1942: The Second Class Mail permit for Social Justice, a weekly newspaper founded by fascist and anti-semitic radio personality Father Charles E. Coughlin, was suspended by Postmaster General Frank Walker on the recommendation of Attorney General Francis Biddle.
“Social Justice reproduces, in this country,” Biddle said, “the lines of the enemy propaganda war being waged against this country from abroad. The Espionage Act of 1917 is designed to defeat this attack.”
February 1, 1943: The VENONA Project, a secret high level code-breaking program run by the Army and later the National Security Agency in cooperation with FBI, commences. It is kept secret from the President by the Army Chief of Staff, Omar Bradley.
1946: The Assistant Director of the Office of Censorship, Theodore F. Koop, publishes Weapon of Silence: Secrets, Censors, and Spies. In it, he notes that then-Director of the Office Byron Price’s “assurance that press and radio were reverting to peacetime freedom” had proved to be premature.”
Focused now on clamping down on discussion of the development of the atomic bomb, the department issued a manifesto:
All individuals, groups and organizations connected with the Manhattan Project will continue to comply with present security regulation. Loose talk and idle speculation, particularly by individuals now or formerly connected with the project, jeopardize the future of the Nation. It is the duty of every citizen, in the interest of national safety, to keep all discussion of this subject within the limits of information disclosed in official releases.
Koop wrote, “The censors’ shears were bayonets that not only formed a rear-guard national defense but also struck hard at the enemy in all three phases of warfare—military, economic, and psychological.” Then, in a mildly chilling preview of what was to come, he added:
For a single country, censorship can be a potent weapon. But when the censorships of a group of nations are linked into a world-wide network, the power is increased to the Geographic Spread.
August 1946: Congress passes the Atomic Energy Act. Henceforth, the FBI is responsible for investigating the backgrounds of persons who were to access restricted nuclear data and for investigation of criminal violations of this act.
January 1, 1947: the civilian Atomic Energy Commission takes over Manhattan Project operations. One result is a decision to “keep information on the plutonium injections secret,” for reasons not pegged to national security, but “public relations and legal liability concerns.”
March 21, 1947: President Harry S Truman issues Executive Order 9835, a.k.a. “Prescribing Procedures for the Administration of an Employees Loyalty Program in the Executive Branch of the Government.”
A key provision of the latest loyalty-oath scheme is the creation of a Central Master Index:
There shall also be established and maintained in the Civil Service Commission a central master index covering all persons on whom loyalty investigations have been made by any department or agency since September 1, 1939.
Another key provision is the formation of a “Loyalty Review Board,” under which the Department of Justice would “furnich” the names of “each foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons which the Attorney General, after appropriate investigation and determination, designates as totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive.” Truman’s own administration would eventually be targeted by his bureaucratic creation.
The DOJ was also responsible for supplying names of people identified as “having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny others their rights under the Constitution of the United States,” or as “seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”
July 26, 1947: The National Security Act of 1947 is signed into law by President Harry S Truman. Among other things, the Act establishes the United States Air Force as a separate branch of the military, and the Central Intelligence Agency as a separate government entity, under the executive branch.
January 27, 1948: The US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, better known as the Smith-Mundt Act, is passed. The Act is designed to regulate the broadcasts of propaganda to foreign audiences under State Department guidance, while prohibiting that same propaganda on domestic broadcasts. The ban on domestic propaganda would be repealed in 2013.
June 18, 1948: President Harry Truman approves “NSC 10/2,” which creates the Office of Special Projects, the brainchild of George Kennan, director of State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and author of the famed “Long Telegram,” considered a foundational document establishing decades of Cold War policy. The office name is later changed to Office of Policy Coordination and Frank Wisner is chosen as the Director. This Office, staffed mostly by OSS veterans, will be the center covert branch of American political action, until it is incorporated into CIA.
1950s: The Term “Disinformation” begins to be widely used in American and British circles, formed on the pattern of Russian dezinformatsiya.
In a Lincoln Day address to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy produced a piece of paper and announced:
The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of Stateas being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.
April 1951: Truman establishes the Psychological Strategy Board. They will prove instrumental in funding the 1954 Hollywood Production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
January 10, 1953: Mary Dublin Keyserling, wife of former Truman economic adviser Leon Keyserling, is cleared after a Loyalty Review Board case was brought against her by McCarthy.
January 22, 1953: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is published, one of what would become a long series of artistic/metaphorical commentaries on dangerously controversial topics. It’s rumored that the character of Elizabeth Proctor is based in part on Mary Keyserling.
August 24, 1954: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs “The Communist Control Act of 1954.”
Eisenhower explains:
The new law which I am signing today includes one of the many recommendations made by this Administration to support existing statutes in defeating the Communist conspiracy in this country… Administratively, we have in the past 19 months stepped up enforcement of laws against subversives. As a result, 41 top Communist leaders have been convicted, 35 more are indicted and scheduled for trial, and 105 subversive aliens have been deported.
Eisenhower complained of witnesses who invoked “Constitutional privilege against self-incrimination” and boasted his law would provide a new “means of breaking through the secrecy which is characteristic of traitors, spies and saboteurs.”
April 5, 1955: Koop, now Director of Washington News and Public Affairs for the Columbia Broadcasting System, writes President Eisenhower to say he’s, “honored to accept the Censorship assignment measured in your letter of March 21. I greatly prize your confidence in me. I can assure you that I shall do my utmost to prepare for an eventuality which I hope will never arise. I would deem it a privilege to talk with you at your convenience, as you suggested.”
June 26, 1958: The construction of DC-01, the first SAGE NETWORK (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) building in the United States, is completed at Maguire Air Force Base in New York. The SAGE NETWORK would be a series of large computers and networking machines that coordinated data from Radar Sites to produce a single image of airspace. The funding and construction of the SAGE network cost more than the Manhattan Project, and was the backbone of American Air Defense networks until the 1980’s. Connected by modems, telephones and fax machines, the SAGE NETWORK laid the groundwork for the ARPANET and Internet.
January 26, 1959: American journalist John Powell is charged with seditionfor a series of articles in the The China Monthly Review, where he wrote that the US military used biological warfare against North Korean and Chinese soldiers, incorporating lessons learned from Imperial Japan’s Unit 731. The case would drag on for five years, the government would drop all charges, and Powell would be blackballed from American journalism forever.
March 28, 1960: The current Special Envoy and Coordinator of the Global Engagement Center, U.S. Department of State’s James Rubin, is born in New York City to Harvey Rubin, who would go on to be an executive at the Satra, the Soviet American Trade Corporation, and Judy Rubin, an art therapist who would make regular guest appearances on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Censorship ahead? There is no “censorship” in present national emergency, White House News Secretary Pierre Salinger was at pains to explain to news media chiefs last week, but plans are going forward and may be announced shortly for Office of Censorship similar in many respects to one operated under ex-AP chief Byran Price during World War II. Remnants of old Office of Censorship have survived during intervening years under leadership of Price’s right hand man, Theodore F. Koop, (CBS vice president) with some of original executive personnel kept on standby basis. Present crisis finds Koop out of the country on vacation, but some other executive reserves have been in Washington for consultation.
1965: Then-Director of Central Intelligence, Vice Admiral W.F. Raborn, who’d made his name in the Government by delivering the Polaris nuclear missile system three years early and under budget using the “program evaluation and review technique,” writes a letter to Clark Clifford, then the head of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, warning of a major foreign disinformation operation whose aim is the “destruction, break-up and neutralization of CIA:
What are disinformation operations? “Dezinformatsiya,” in Soviet terminology, is false, incomplete or misleading information that is passed, fed or confirmed to a targetted (sic) individual, group or country. “Propaganda” as it is defined by Free World students, may be used as a support element of dezinformatsiya, but propaganda per se lacks the precision and bite of disinformation.
Raborn writes that a purpose of the unit is to “sow distrust” and “create grounds for subversion and revolt against the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere and among the new nations of Africa and Asia… These purposes and objectives, it must be emphasized, have been established by the highest elements of Party and Government in the Soviet Union.”
April, 1967: Ramparts magazine reports that the National Student Association received funding from CIA.
September, 1968: Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague to suppress the Czech Spring, Major Ladislav Bittman, former deputy head of head of Czech Intelligence’s Department ‘D’ for ‘active measures,’ (their Secret Service department in charge of “Black Propaganda and disinformation” defects to the United States by way of West Germany. Bittman later changed his name to Lawrence Martin and taught journalism at Boston University. He founded the “Program for the Study of Disinformation” in the mid 1980’s, this is the first academic center in the US to focus on disinformation.
December, 1968: The Stanford Research Institute (SRI) issues a report “A Study of Computer Network Design Parameters” to the Advanced Research Projects as part of the development of ARAPANET, the forerunner to the internet.
June 30, 1971: In a 6-3 Ruling, the Supreme Court rules in favor of the New York Times in New York Times Co. v. United States, which allowed the newspaper to publish extracts from a purloined classified Pentagon history of the Vietnam war. The case is a landmark verdict on press freedom and the burden of government prior restraint.
January 15, 1977: SATRA, The Soviet American Trading Company where Harvey Rubin is vice president, is awarded broadcast rights to the 1980 Moscow Olympics
January 4, 1978: The ARPANET Completion Report is published, signaling the birth of the modern Internet.
1981: The Reagan administration founds the “Active Measures Working Group,” an interagency detail led by Department of State official Mark Palmer. Shedding a years-long disinclination to discuss “disinformation” openly, the new group begins to publish papers “countering” Soviet propaganda and Soviet-tied rumors, beginning with a paper in 1981 purporting to debunk stories about U.S. responsibility for the the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the killing of a Panamanian leader, and other tales.
September 20, 1983: The Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, briefs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:
On the covert side, Moscow has developed a vigorous program of “active measures” that is carried out in large part by a growing overseas presence that includes diplomats, Aeroflot employees, and the representatives of Soviet trade and news organizations…
Casey warns that “Soviet active measures” include “media manipulation” and “disinformation,” as well as “agents of influence” and “other subversive activities.”
July 24, 1985: The CIA Delivers a report on its “Conference on Contemporary Soviet Propaganda and Disinformation,” writing:
The report will be given broad dissemination by the State Department. A number of the conferees suggested that a list of participants would be useful to keep each other informed and to involve each other in related work as time passes. Some saw this as a first step in helping to create a network of specialists interested in disinformation issues.
In another past example of media cooperation with intelligence goals, the former editor of Commentary Magazine and US Information Agency adviser Norman Podhoretz is mentioned. Podhoretz “delivered the keynote address to a CIA Dis-information conference,” an address titled, “Causes of Western Vulnerability due to semantic manipulation.”
1985: As a result of a series of high profile espionage arrests, 1985 is characterized in media as the “Year of the Spy.”
October 21, 1998: The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is signed into law by President Bill Clinton. This is one of the earliest legislative efforts to regulate the transmission of web content:
Whoever knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or foreign commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors shall be fined not more than $50,000, imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both.
October 26, 2001: Shortly after 9/11, President George Bush signs into law the “Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act,” a.k.a. the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. This sweeping law would provide the foundation for a generation of essentially extralegal anti-terrorist interdiction, and would eventually serve as a template for other, broader efforts to regulate information and conduct surveillance.
January 2002: The Pentagon Military Analyst program developed by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke quietly launches “to spread the administration’s talking points on Iraq by briefing retired commanders for network and cable television appearances,” without disclosing their active Pentagon connections. Analysts were known as “message force multipliers.”
March, 2003: The Department of Defense begins a policy of “embedding” reporters within military units for the War in Iraq, provided the embedded reporters agree to ground rules and basic military censorship.
March 9, 2006: President Bush signs the USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization act of 2005, in the East Room of the White House. House Speaker Dennis Hastert is present at the signing. The Act allows “Internet service providers to disclose customer records voluntarily to the government in emergencies involving an immediate risk of death or serious physical injury and permits victims of hacking crimes to request law enforcement assistance in monitoring trespassers on their computers.”
March 21, 2006: Jack Dorsey sends the first message on twitter at 9:50PM PST. “just setting up my twttr.” The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) for that tweet will later sell for $2.9M.
August 2, 2007: S-1959, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 is introduced and defeated in the Senate, after passing the house as H.R. 1955 on April 2007. The Bill was Co-Sponsored by Rep. Bennie Thompson, who would later have a prominent role on the January 6 committee.
An Opinion piece in SF Gate in 2008, “Rule by fear or rule by law?”by Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg, notes the following:
Some media commentary wonders at a law that labels as terrorists people who “engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights” as terrorists. The ACLU, at the time still keenly interested in such issues, releases a statement saying:
Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be extreme.
January 4, 2011: Tunisian street vendor Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolates in Ben Arous, Tunisia, after harassment by municipal officials. This will be seen as the inciting event of the Arab Spring, a series of social media fueled popular uprisings across the Middle East .
September 27, 2011: Michael Furlong, a retired Army psyops colonel, resigns from his SES position in the Air Force after it comes to light that his “INFORMATION OPERATIONS CAPSTONE” program in Afghanistan is cover for a private spy ring operating in “The Grey Zone” of legality, especially since it was run since 2009 by pardoned Iran Contra conspirator and CIA legend Duane “Dewey” Clarridge
March 2, 2012: USA Today, which later will become an enthusiastic partner of “anti-disinformation” operations, publishes “US ‘info ops’ programs dubious, costly”:
WASHINGTON – As the Pentagon has sought to sell wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to often-hostile populations there, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on poorly tracked marketing and propaganda campaigns that military leaders like to call “information operations,” the modern equivalent of psychological warfare.
May 18, 2012: My former colleague Michael Hastings publishes a piece in now-defunct Buzzfeed, titled, “Congressmen Seek to Lift Propaganda Ban: Propaganda that was supposed to target foreigners could now be aimed at Americans, reversing a longstanding policy.” Hastings would prove prescient:
The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.
January 2, 2014: CNN’S Jake Tapper notes, accurately: “the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists … more than all previous administrations combined.”
November 16, 2018: President Donald Trump signs into law the “Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018” establishing CISA as a subagency within Department of Homeland Security with a multibillion dollar budget.
November 17, 2020: Inaugural CISA Director Christopher Krebs is fired by President Trump via tweet for remarks he made about the security of the presidential election.
May 18, 2022: The Department of Homeland Security’s ill-fated “Disinformation Governance Board” is “paused” after just three weeks. Papers like the Washington Post blame “right-wing attacks” for its closure.
Sept 08, 2022: The RAND Corporation publishes “INFORMATION WARFARE: Methods to Counter Disinformation” which advocates “developing counter-strategies and we specifically identify the concept of kill chains as a useful framework to assist in the disinformation challenge,” essentially incorporating the assassination doctrine of JSOC in Iraq and Afghanistan to domestic publications.
December 2, 2022: Twitter Files #1 is published, beginning a series of reports that will disclose wide-ranging “anti-disinformation” efforts under the Departments of State and Homeland Security, in addition to the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and an as-yet-undetermined number of civil society organizations.
US Rig Count Tumbles To Annual Decline; Jobs & Production Next?
Baker Hughes just reported that the total number of active drilling rigs in the US tumbled by 11 last week to 720 – down 8 rigs on a YoY basis…
Source: Bloomberg
This is the first annual decline since April 2021.
The first question we have is simple – with rigs now down almost 10% from the February highs – will Oil & Gas Extraction Industry jobs start to decline?
Source: Bloomberg
The decline in the number of rigs was entirely attributed to oil rigs, which fell by 11 this week to 575. Gas rigs stayed the same at 141. Miscellaneous rigs stayed the same at 4.
Source: Bloomberg
That drop in oil rigs suggests US crude production is due to decline, which should, all things being equal, imply higher prices (but for now it is not).
The State Department has claimed that it mistakenly added mandatory pronouns to the “from” line on all the Department’s emails after it was called out by an AP reporter.
The journalist, Matt Lee, challenged Deputy State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, demanding to know why official emails were being sent with pronouns added to them.
“Within the last hour and a half… the State Department’s internal email system — and I tested this, so I know that it’s true —has added pronouns to people’s … not their signature … but to where it says from,” Lee said, asking “Why?”
“This is not an optional thing,” Lee said, adding “the problem is that a lot of them or at least some of them so far, as I’ve been able to tell, are wrong! They’re giving the wrong pronouns! So men are being identified as women and women as men…. It’s ridiculous!”
Patel had no knowledge of the development and couldn’t provide any answers.
Watch:
WATCH: AP’s Matt Lee asks Biden State Department why they’ve added mandatory pronouns onto the from line on State Department emails.
“This is not an optional thing. … But the problem is that a lot of them or at least some of them so far, as I’ve been able to tell, are wrong!… pic.twitter.com/KVnbnICrUT
Following the exchange, the State department issued a statement claiming “This change was unintentional and the bureau is working to correct this immediately.”
Easy mistake to make I guess, coding an email delivery system to add pronouns itself automatically. We’ve all done it, right?
The State Dept. uses Microsoft Exchange. Coding entirely new fields into Exchange is not exactly trivial. They spent enormous amounts of time and effort on this debacle. https://t.co/485Usg9Rqe
This comes from the same department that ‘celebrates’ some sort of obscure alphabet pride or pronoun day, that no one even knows exists, practically every week, has introduced ‘Gender X’ passports, and flies rainbow flags on the same pole as U.S. flags at embassies:
On International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia we call for an end to harmful conversion therapy practices, including those that attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics. #IDAHOBITpic.twitter.com/DA5XRXvb2Y
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) May 17, 2023
Today on International Pronouns Day, we share why many people list pronouns on their email and social media profiles. Read more here on @ShareAmerica: https://t.co/gWhoItvGvo.
On #TransDayofVisibility, we recognize the inspiring courage of trans and non-binary people and the countless contributions they’ve made to communities around the world. We will continue to promote equality, inclusion, and respect for the human rights of all trans people. pic.twitter.com/GbnTmNRB6j
The State Department issues the first passport with a nonbinary gender “X” option: After a lawsuit, the Biden administration promised earlier this year that it would make the documents more inclusive for people who identify as nonbinary, intersex and… https://t.co/PtNm7TYiSJpic.twitter.com/4LBNCE9rdb
— Marcus Evans 📚 ⚛️ 🔭 ⚖️ 💙 🎼 🏅 (@MarcuswevansSr) October 27, 2021
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Miller Lite Defends Execs After Woke Ad Sparks Backlash
As consumers become increasingly aware that they’re drinking watered-down and overpriced beer while mega-brewers inject woke messaging into advertisements, some beer drinkers have had enough and boycotted these brands.
The Wall Street Journal reports Molson Coors Beverage, which owns Miller Lite, is defending a marketing executive after netizens were unhappy with a recently released woke ad.
“People can take issue with our ads or our brands, but we won’t stand by as people personally attack our employees—especially given that these are company decisions, and are never made by one single person,” the brewer’s spokesman Adam Collins wrote in an email.
“Here’s a little known fact. Women were among the very first to brew beer ever — from Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages to Colonial America. Women were the ones doing the brewing,” actress Ilana Glazer said in the video. She complained: “Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer? They put us in bikinis. Wow.”
Glazer continued: “It’s time beer made it up to women. So today, Miller Lite is on a mission to clean up not just their sh*t but the whole beer industry’s sh*t. Miller Lite has been scouring the internet for all this sh*t and buying it that they can turn it into good sh*t for women brewers. Literally, good sh*t.”
“So here’s to women. Because without us there would be no beer,” she claimed.
Although the video was posted months ago, social media users have brought attention to the ad this week as some accuse Miller Lite’s corporate executives of “joining the woke cult” and failing to understand its customer base.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 15, 2023
Collins said:
“This video was about two things: worm poop and saying women shouldn’t be forced to mud wrestle in order to sell beer. Neither of these things should be remotely controversial and we hope beer drinkers can appreciate the humor (and ridiculousness) of this video from back in March.”
Collins did not provide examples of what he claims are “people personally attack our employees.” Nor did the WSJ author care to give examples.
The only example that the WSJ author cited was podcast host Joe Rogan who said:
“I hate identity politics with a passion, I really do.
“It’s so stupid. Human beings made beer, OK? And some human beings look good in bikinis.”
… is a symptom that brewer execs might be terrified of consumers’ opinions where they can no longer control the narrative.
Woke mega corporations should respect consumers instead of going on the offensive.
Recall, German gun manufacturer Heckler & Koch’s social media person went on a woke rant earlier this week. The company immediately deleted the tweets and said, “H&K does not engage in identity politics. A policy was violated. Changes were made.”
